What is Cuba doing right?
Cuba is a small island nation of about 11 million people, yet on its own has resisted the trade embargo of its very powerful neighbor (Hint: the neighbor spends more on its military than the next eight largest spenders combined). The last of a handful of communist governments, Cuba is a contradiction, with one of the world’s highest literacy rates of 99.8% but also an appallingly low average salary of $6,000/year. (Here is the math for that: Trade embargo + state-run enterprise = low wages)
It has an extraordinary track record in the field of medicine, being the leading contributor of healthcare personnel to Africa, the leading contributor to the Haiti earthquake relief, accounting for over 40% of the patients treated, and the leading contributor to Pakistan’s 2005 Kashmir earthquake, having treated a whopping 70% of the injured. The average Cuban life expectancy is 77.5 years, as opposed to 78.1 years in the United States, and infant and child mortality rates either match or beat the US. There’s one doctor for every 170 people, more than twice the per-capita US average. Both education and healthcare are available for free in Cuba, to some extent. Now it is looking for an alternative to state-run enterprise without causing an explosion of inequality. The answer is ‘cooperatives’.
What about Cuba’s cooperatives?
Now that relations are normalizing between Cuba and America, Cuba is beginning to brace itself for the inevitable wave of change. Few are aware that just a few years prior, Cuba was already changing its economy from its state-controlled roots; from state-run enterprises to citizen-run cooperatives. Rather than simply handing everything to a few mega-corporations, it has given its own people a greater stake in the economy. In this way, Cuba has waved away the common ‘straw man’ argument that state-run companies are inefficient and that the only alternative is to privatize and sell public companies to very greedy private interests. A third option exists:
Cooperatives differ from regular private enterprise by allowing groups of workers to share the profits they make, as opposed to allowing a singular corporate owner to earn income based on the work of the lowest employees.
Cooperatives have been a part of Cuba for a long time, with agricultural cooperatives accounting for 70% of the country’s farmed land. Worker cooperatives were rarely seen elsewhere, on the other hand. In 2011 however, the Cuban congress approved several economic reform initiatives known as the ‘Guidelines on Economic and Social Policy for the Party and the Revolution’. Containing 313 measures, such as the five below:
- Decentralize the operation of state enterprises
- Dramatically increase non-state sector employment of the labour force
- Encourage large-scale private sector business opportunities
- Allow for the creation of non-agricultural worker cooperatives for the first time
- Provide for the use of idle lands in usufruct
Since the reform, 500 non-agriculture cooperatives have sprung up in Cuba. These range from technical services to auto repair shops and even beauty salons. Although these are still state-approved, the salaries of cooperative workers have risen and productivity has sky-rocketed.
In 2014, the NCBA CLUSA ‘Cuba Cooperative Working Group’ (or CCWG) was formed. It was created to, “explore opportunities for engaging with Cuba on cooperative development in various sectors of the country’s economy.” It met with several US cooperative leaders who came from a variety of industries and were also interested in cooperating with the Cuban cooperatives, policy makers and cooperative researchers.
The first project for the working group was to simply take a one-week trip to Cuba in order to learn about Cuba’s cooperative revolution, its economy and how cooperatives have played a key role in its economic reform. The group’s ‘Cuba Research Trip’ report outlines their observations, focusing on some of the challenges the cooperative movement in Cuba faces.
A cooperative economy would provide a viable alternative to a purely market-driven economy for Cuba. According to the report, “It appears that the hope of the Cuban government, and many supporters of the cooperative model, is to develop a cooperative sector that achieves market success while avoiding the excesses of the market-driven economy and promoting social values and ownership.”
Will Cuba’s cooperative dream crash now that it has been reintroduced to American corporate interests? Or can America learn a thing or two from the Cubans about creating a more equal society with cooperatives? Inequality has never been higher in America, but information regarding Cuba’s inequality is unavailable. Cuba has shown empirically that it is more focused on improving the well-being of the average person via privatization-through-cooperatives, while continuing to offer free education and healthcare.
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Wow, this sounds like how communism was actually SUPPOSED to work. You know, with actual COMMUNES? Too bad “Uncle Joe” fucked that up for everybody.
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